“Thou hast not known the joys of sleeping
Thou has not dreamed”

J.Barlas, The Mystic Cave

There’s a shut-eye shortage. All night,
  Lamps, thick as sun-spit, turn cogs.
Tick-tock ker-ching won’t let us rest.

Our tongues are coffee stained; in denial
  of what we crave, we slit sleep’s throat.
We wake to whip-crack days, absolved.

Anaerobic stress digestor, druid healer, 
  door in back of a wardrobe. Sleep
little darling, my lullay, my sweeting.

The blur of abuse huddles on pavements.
  In rented rooms, mould chaws on the lungs 
of napping toddlers and we too lie awake.

The News moves us. A boy cowers below 
  a plane-starry shooting sky; his sleep 
is a cold lump in a morgue. Our day yawns.

In lit corners of dimmed, airless wards, 
  blanket-chafed bodies float in a bleeping,
pulsing haze, curled to the last rounded rest.

O Morpheus, donor of hotties, blinds, pills,
  Horlicks, heal our cracked eyes, remove 
their black bags and hear our prayers.

Helen Kay is a poet who curates the Nantwich Poetry Page and the website dyslexiapoetry@co.uk which supports neurodivergent writers.

John Barlas (1860-1914) was a Scottish Morrisonian Marxist Romantic poet, friend of Oscar Wilde and devotee of Algernon Swinburn. The Mystic Cave viewed sleep as an escape to something beautiful rather than as a hindrance to increasing capitalist production.